Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book is a history of the kinds of interest people have taken in birds, from prehistoric times, through to when birds became the subject of scientific examination and interest, through to the 20th century, when they became the objects of conservation and of obsessive attention from the kinds of birdwatchers who would now be called twitchers. It’s a very good history of the social background to all this and it makes the point that birding is a very ecumenical activity – it involves all kinds and levels of people.
So your next choice, A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching by Stephen Moss presumably goes into the whole phenomenon of birdwatching…
This is a relatively new book, and for me it brought everything into perspective. It is a history of the kinds of interest people have taken in birds, from prehistoric times, through to when birds became the subject of scientific examination and interest, of taxonomy and so on, and through to the various stages in the 20th century, when they became the objects of conservation and of obsessive attention from the kinds of birdwatchers who would now be called twitchers: their only interest in birds being in how many different ones they can see, how many they can count and so on.
It’s a very good history of the social background to all this and it makes the point, among many others, that birding is a very ecumenical activity – it involves all kinds and levels of people. If you’re standing in a crowd of people watching birds, you could be standing next to an MP, a vicar, a university professor, several working-class lads, a couple of secretaries, and a nightclub dancer. You just can’t tell who is going to take an interest in birds: it’s spread across genders, across occupations, across social classes. And this history is really a kind of map of the different people who take an interest in birds, and the different kinds of interest they take in them.
So does Moss feel it’s gone downhill in the 20th century, with all these twitchers, people just looking out for birds so they can tick them off their list?
He doesn’t think it’s gone downhill, but he charts various phases, and he makes the point that the phase of the twitcher is now being replaced gradually by people who take a rather broader interest, as I try to do myself of course. He actually refers to Baker’s book on the peregrine as an early marker of a change of interest of that kind, which various other writers are now trying to take further.
But how would you describe this broader interest that you have?
My interest is in the relationship between human beings and birds. My book is as much about us as it is about them, or at least it’s about the connection between the two. Why is it birds that attract such a high degree of interest from us rather than some other group in the animal kingdom? And why is it some birds rather than others? Why do we find some sorts of birds attractive and not others? And what does all this tell us about ourselves?
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Jeremy Mynott is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the former chief executive of Cambridge University Press. Throughout his career, he spent his hard-won leisure time pursuing his interest in birds in many parts of the world. He now lives in Suffolk, though he still makes regular excursions to watch birds in favourite places including the Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly, the Volga Delta and New York’s Central Park. He has devoted much thought to the place of birds in our lives and the reasons we react to them as we do, culminating in his book, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2009. He is currently translating Thucydides for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, and his next project will be an anthology of writings about birds in the ancient world.
